Study: Packing your troubles away keeps bad memories at bay

A recent New York TimesModern Love essay introduced us to Death Bear, a 7-foot-tall performance artist in a bear suit who, by appointment, will whisk away reminders of a failed relationship and other painful mementos. It's a quirky take on a sad refrain, the process of collecting items that remind us of hurt feelings, hiding them away in a box and shelving them in a cluttered closet.

But does stowing memories away -- or handing them off to a stranger -- actually make us feel better?

A new study out of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests it does. Packing away materials related to an unpleasant experience improved negative feelings toward the event -- and led to psychological closure, the researchers found in four distinct experiments.

"If you tell people, 'You've got to move on,' that doesn't work," Soman said. "What works is when people enclose materials that are relevant to the negative memories they have. It works because people aren't trying to explicitly control their emotions."

More work is needed to understand exactly why the ritual of removing from sight those items that produce negative feelings makes us feel better, the researchers said. They wrote:

It is not clear whether people need to actually go through the process of "physical enclosure" to attain the effect of psychological closure. It is also likely that merely observing others doing the enclosing for them is sufficient to sooth their emotions. Future study is required to determine whether the activity itself or its consequence (i.e., the emotionally laden item being sealed up) is essential for mitigation of negative emotions.

The authors did suggest that their work could provide sales opportunities. If people realize that items reminding them of painful past events are distracting, they might buy services that take away the memories. For example, fast pick-up couriers could expeditiously remove old photos of an ex, while pre-paid mortgage deals could relieve a buyer's sense of debt burden.